Report for BodyNets2011 in Beijing, China - by Nimesha Ranasinghe
6th International Conference on Body Area Networks (BodyNets 2011) Date: 07-11-2011 to 08-11-2011 Venue: FIT (Future Internet Technology) building, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China The 6th International Conference on Body Area Networks (BodyNets 2011) was held in Beijing, China from 07th Nov 2011 to 08th Nov 2011. The conference was held in Asia for the first time after regular stops in US and Europe. BodyNets is a forum for engineers, scientists and medical professionals to exchange ideas, discuss practices, raise awareness, and to share cutting edge technologies and experiences in various Body Area Network applications such as health monitoring, human-computer interaction, education and entertainment. There were around 70 participants mainly from academia in above fields for the conference. It was a relatively small conference with seven sessions of paper presentations and one poster/demo session over two days. Most of the submissions were focusing on utilizing sensor networks on medical purposes and analyzing health related information from body area sensor networks. In fact, only we presented work on actuating human senses, whereas all the other works presented related to digital sensing and analysis of sensor data. There were two keynote speeches for two days: 1) End-to-End research and innovation in wireless health by Professor Majid Sarrafzadeh from UCLA and 2) Solutions towards problems of scale and lifetime in BSNs by Professor John A. Stankovic from University of Virginia. During keynote I, Prof. Majid Sarrafzadeh discussed the latest trend in wireless health monitoring and its application towards remote health monitoring systems. He is particularly interested in research that led to a successful launch of large multi-institutional clinical trials with congestive heart failure patients. He presented few examples on wireless health systems such as a system for encouraging children to exercise in exchange for rewards and imbalance detection based on smart shoes. In the second keynote, Prof. John highlights the importance of the quality of wireless communication and lifetime issues for body area sensor networks. He discussed various approaches to real-time scheduling, including the development of a theory and practice of feedback control real-time scheduling for wireless sensor networks. Furthermore, he presented strategies on UWB and narrowband communication on body area networks, using low power sub-threshold circuit devices for body area networks, and cross-layer filtering and compression of data from body area sensor networks. Few slides explaining important factors and current difficulties on wireless health care systems, IMG_20111107_084551.jpg|important factors involve with wireless health care systems IMG_20111107_084820.jpg|end-to-end integration IMG_20111107_085930.jpg|lack of a computation model We presented our paper “Digital taste and smell communication” on Tuesday (08 November 2011) during the Applications session. There were around 30 attendees for the session from different cultures, especially from China, USA, and Europe. Then the same day evening I presented the invited poster submission. During the presentation and interactive poster session, several people asked questions on usability of such a device also the technical aspects of our approach. One of the technical program chairs, Dr. Jafari has shown a strong interest in our approach and discussed future possibilities of such methodology for medical applications. Furthermore, he advised the importance of conducting more experiments for classifying different properties of current and taste sensations during the poster session discussion. On future approach of digital smell generation, many attendees queried on the possibility and the related research works which Kasun has explained during the presentation. Overall, it was a pleasurable experience discussing with researchers from a diverse background. I learned a lot on wireless health monitoring and its communication protocols. Next section presents various intriguing papers and posters presented during the conference. Interesting paper presentations 1) myHealthAssistant: A Phone-based Body Sensor Network that Captures the Wearer’s Exercises throughout the Day: This paper presents a body sensor network consists of body-worn sensors and a Smartphone as an aggregator that allow monitoring a patient's parameters in real-time and therefore fits to those requirements. Moreover, they have developed a fitness diary which captures a person's heart rate, calorie expenditure, daily activities, as well as specific gym exercises. This preventive health care application intends to motivate patients to increase their level of physical activity and to decrease the risk of disabling health conditions. 2) Identification of Relevant Multimodal Cues to enhance Context-Aware Hearing Instruments: This paper presents a hearing instrument (HI) combined with a body sensor network to recognize complex user contexts and enhance next-generation HIs. This instrument lets wearer to select the hearing program automatically based on their hearing wishes. In this, different hearing wishes could be weighted differently, e.g. orientation in traffic might occur rarely, but could be prioritized because of safety issues. 3) How’s my Mood and Stress? An Efficient Speech Analysis Library for Unobtrusive Monitoring on Mobile Phones: This mental health monitor (AMMON) can detect early stage problems, measure health trend of the public, and promote public health. It was designed to work on Smartphone where it can track information on emotion, mood, stress, and mental state of the user based on his/her voice. AMMON can recognize emotions in state-of-the-art accuracy and detect stress with improved accuracy by the additional glottal features. The glottal features will also benefit mental health analysis, e.g. depression. Through this they propose few application areas such as Improving emotional intelligence, Managing social relationships, and Computer-assisted psychotherapy. 4) Bilateral Vibrotactile Feedback Patterns for Accurate Lateralization in Hearing Instrument Body Area Networks: As a potential future hearing instrument component, this paper presents a technology based on bilateral vibrotactile feedback to support localization of sound sources. The paper investigates that which feedback and vibration patterns are most suitable and evaluates lateralization error and user response time. 5) A Feature Selection-Based Framework for Human Activity Recognition Using Wearable Multimodal Sensors: The authors are using a 6-DOF inertial measurement unit (IMU) specifically designed for human motion sensing applications called MotionNode (www.motionnode.com), which attached firmly onto the participant’s right front hip for human activity recognition. They designed a new set of features (called physical features) based on the physical parameters of human motion and mapped them into the statistical features. This activity model is based on the sliding window strategy which divides the continuous sensor streams into fixed length windows to process. Few slides on Body-Area Sensor Networks, IMG_20111108_083704.jpg|A multi-functional BSN IMG_20111108_084201.jpg|Study on remote BSN IMG_20111108_095704.jpg|openSMILE IMG_20111107_091839.jpg|typical wireless health monitoring framework *openSMILE: A fast, real-time (audio) feature extraction utility for automatic speech, music and paralinguistic recognition Interesting posters DSC_0384.JPG DSC_0389.JPG **'Conference proceedings available at:''' ''ftp://137.132.145.213/share/Bodynets2011